Technologies and Principles

At Google, we pursue ideas and products that often push the limits of existing technology. As a company that acts responsibly, we work hard to make sure any innovation is balanced with the appropriate level of privacy and security for our users. Our Privacy Principles help guide decisions we make at every level of our company, so we can help protect and empower our users while we fulfill our ongoing mission to organize the world’s information.

Privacy principles

Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.

“Focus on providing the best user experience” is the first tenet of Google’s philosophy. When users share information with us, it allows us to build services and products that are valuable to them. We believe that focusing on the user fosters both the products and privacy-enhancing features that have fueled innovation and built a loyal audience of users online.

We learn from the typos and spelling mistakes we all make when searching to help give you quicker and more accurate search results. So if you type [grizzly pears] we can guess you probably meant [grizzly bears].

Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.

Our ambition is to be at the leading edge of technology, including the development of tools that help users manage their personal information in a simple, accessible manner without detracting from a valuable user experience. We comply with privacy laws, and additionally work internally and with regulators and industry partners to develop and implement strong privacy standards.

We designed Google+ with circles to make it easy to share different things with different people. So you can put your friends in one circle, your family in another and your boss in a circle all by himself – just like real life.

Make the collection of personal information transparent.

We strive to show users the information used to customize our services. Where appropriate, we aim to be transparent about the information we have about individual users and how we use that information to deliver our services.

Google Dashboard helps answer the question, “What does Google know about me?” It shows you the information stored in your Google Account, like your last Blogger blog or your uploaded photos, and enables you to change your privacy settings for many Google products from one central location.

Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

With our privacy tools you can encrypt the search traffic between your computer and Google, browse the internet in private, delete your search history, move your data out of Google products easily with our Data Liberation effort, and much more.

Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

We recognize our responsibility to protect the data that users entrust to us. We take security issues seriously and work together with a large community of users, developers and external security experts to make the Internet safer and more secure.

We design security and resilience into our products from the ground up. Our automated scanners use data to protect millions of users each day from malware, phishing scams, fraud, and spam.